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It’s easy to sit back and say that the reading public, or at least what is left of it, doesn’t read enough short stories—as so many a critic has done over the past few years. And it’s true: we don’t. So I count it as a political act of sorts to seek out short story collections particularly those, this will come as no surprise, written by women. When it’s a young woman, to boot, well, count me in.

Reading Suzanne Rivecca’s debut short story collection, Death is Not an Option, may have started as a political act on my part, but it quickly became a rabid obsession. The collection is brilliant—a rare and wildly entertaining mix of feminist wit, highly original prose, and endlessly endearing and familiar characters. Rivecca deals with a smargasbord of issues that we write about on this blog every day—sexual assault, religious dogma, adolescent sexuality—in the most poetic and moving of ways. It’s as if the smartest, funniest Feministing reader ever, wrote a collection of short stories (or at least that’s how it felt to me). Here’s just a taste of her moving prose:

It’s like those rare moments in life when we are hit with an urge to explain. Along with the delusion that everyone cares, that everyone has been waiting with bated breath all along, all through the long desert of our silence, and after we tell all they will look at us with dewy pride and love.

Rivecca actually goes on to explain how these rare moments are usually proven false, that no one is “waiting with bated breath” for our shining insights. But in this case, she’s wrong. I look on her bravery, her sensibility, her talent with “dewy pride and love,” both.

Every month we share what our team is reading. We’re about four months overdue this time around (better late than never?), so without further ado, here’s what’s on our nightstands these days…

Sejal: This month, I read Malcolm Harris’s very good Kids These Days. It’s one of the first books about millennials that’s actually, well, by a millennial, and I found a lot in it that resonated. Harris argues that from elementary school on, our lives are a boot camp designed to make us maximally productive workers, on the theory that we’d get a fair shot in the world if we just invest in our own human capital — all while an increasingly precarious economy makes that ...

Every month we share what our team is reading. We’re about four months overdue this time around (better late than never?), so without further ado, here’s what’s on our nightstands these days…

It’s hard to strike a balance between the self-possession on which depend first principles—mutual responsibility, self-determination, and other such enduring commitments—with the humility to remain genuinely open to new comrades and new stimuli. Good art and good politics require both, or so Grace Paley helps me imagine.

During her long life and since, Paley has been well appreciated as one of the twentieth century’s most inventive writers of short fiction, though she only published three story collections over a span of twenty-five years. (Paley died in 2007 at the age of 84.) The great gift of the recently published A Grace Paley Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which collects selected stories alongside Paley’s less widely read essays and poems, ...

It’s hard to strike a balance between the self-possession on which depend first principles—mutual responsibility, self-determination, and other such enduring commitments—with the humility to remain genuinely open to new comrades and new stimuli. Good art and good ...

Here’s what our team is reading this month! Tell us what we missed in the comments.

Reina: I’m rereading Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities. It’s a beautiful work of history about late nineteenth century British radicals whose friendships with various Indian radicals caused them to protest England’s imperial regime. Gandhi theorizes a “politics of friendship” as the capacity for humans to act against their own group interests (of class, race, nationality) in friendship with people unlike them. She connects British anti-imperialist thought not only to late nineteenth century utopian socialism, but to animal rights, spiritualism, and homosexuality, arguing that all these movements fundamentally challenged the colonizer’s idea of the human — and presented the possibility of radical forms of community. I ...

Here’s what our team is reading this month! Tell us what we missed in the comments.

Reina: I’m rereading Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities. It’s a beautiful work of history about late nineteenth century British radicals whose ...

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All Feministing posts are written by the site’s collective of regular columnists and editors. Though we don’t currently accept guest submissions, we have an open platform Community site to which anyone can contribute. We often promote our favorite Community posts on the main site. And Community bloggers who consistently impress us may to be invited to become regular Feministing columnists..